Guild Wars 2: The Elementalist, Skills and You
You can turn into a freakin' tornado!

Updates on Guild Wars 2, the highly anticipated massively multiplayer sequel from ArenaNet, haven't been all that frequent since the game was  unveiled at last year's Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany. Then today the official website was updated with a detailed explanation of Guild Wars 2's combat philosophy, and the first official profession reveal along with plenty of hints about another.

Like Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2 is an ability-focused game. Since you can only have ten skilled set as active on a character at a time, you'll need to carefully pick and choose what they want to use. According to the feature by Lead Designer Eric Flannum on the official site "The first five skills on the skill bar are not slotted directly by the player; instead they are determined by the player's choice of weapon and profession." The second group of five is purely player-chosen, and can draw upon both profession (or class) abilities and racials. One slot is reserved for healing skills, meaning each profession has some means of healing themselves, their allies or both. Another slot is reserved for 'elite skills' that "trigger visually spectacular and powerful effects". Elite skills are intended to be potent, effective and "infrequently-used".

ArenaNet aims to keep combat very mobile. According to Flannum, "One of our priorities in developing Guild Wars 2 has been to make the simple act of moving around and interacting with the world an enjoyable experience for our players." For example, players can now jump and swim, which is a welcome change from the original, in which all players wore magical glue-boots. More broadly, however, many skills and abilities will be affected by positioning, the earliest example of which we can see in the Elementalist's Phoenix ability video.

Another important focus has been to create visually appealing, but easily identifiable effects for abilities. "Our goal is to design skills that are visually unique and explain them without overly complex skill descriptions. This has resulted in a lot of distinct and impressive skill effects in the game." says the Lead Designer. Again, you need only look to the Elementalist videos associated with today's update to see for yourself just what they mean.

The Elementalist is a high-damage profession with some flexibility and utility. Being able to conjure weapons, protect and slowly heal allies and temporarily disable enemies are all part of an Elementalist's bag of tricks. Their real strength, however, is their ability to toast monsters at a range and in groups.

Elementalists attune themselves to a specific element (water, fire, earth or air) and deal damage based on their chosen attunement. Like other professions, the choice of weapon affects the skills the Elementalist has at its disposal, but so does the Elementalist's attunement. In general, Elementalists may be damage dealers, but their attunement can provide other benefits. A fire attuned Elementalist will be focusing on area-of-effect damage, while water provides the player with avenues to modify an enemy's movement, and provides the Elementalist's allies with some healing. Air deals focused, single-target damage, and earth Elementalists provide protection for themselves and their allies.

Churning Earth, which seems to no longer be a damage-over-time ability, and appears – at least in this instance – to center on the caster. The ability seems to draw somewhat upon the fire school's specialty of area-of-effect damage, but Churning Earth totally wipes out almost a half-dozen enemies.

Meteor Shower, in which fiery boulders drop from the sky, is an area-of-effect fire spell. This spell was introduced in Prophecies, and is making its return here. From the video we can see that meteors cause damage independently of each other and cause a knockdown effect, so you may be lucky enough to completely decimate an enemy, or barely cause a scratch.

Phoenix also makes a return, but in a fundamentally different form. No longer a simple exploding ranged attack, Phoenix conjures a mythical flaming bird (or a "phoenix") which flies directly towards your targeted enemy, damaging anything that is in its path. It still explodes when it arrives at its destination, but then makes a return journey, meaning anything that didn't die the first time around probably will the second.

Static Field is a brand new ability. Ever shock yourself when getting out of the car or off of a trampoline? Well, this looks way worse, if such a thing is even possible. The Elementalist causes a big, whirling field of electricity to form, stunning any enemy that passes into it for a few seconds. It also causes The Elementalist to say cheesy one-liners. This is assumedly to discourage players from repeatedly using the ability.

The final ability on display is Water Trident, which appears again from Prophecies, and looks to have some added utility. No longer simply a ranged and damaging knockdown spell, Water Trident looks to knock enemies back. The video shows two Elementalists standing in a pool of water as they cast, and considering the emphasis on the environment for combat, it's not outside the realms of possibility that standing in water boosts or alters water abilities somehow. We asked, though, and that's totally not the case. Standing in water only gets your feet wet.

Also mentioned, but with no footage to go along with it, is an Elementalist elite skill (name not mentioned) that turns the caster into a tornado, dealing heavy damage and throwing enemies around. This by itself sounds interesting, but thinking of the combinations that a tornado could create with other abilities (firestorms? Bending arrows?) makes my head hurt. Plus, can you even hurt a tornado?

The Elementalist's bag of tricks doesn't stop there. Glyphs can provide the player with temporary buffs, such as the Glyph of Elemental Power which provides increased damage and range, and increases how long spell effects last. Signets are longer lasting buffs that can be "activated" for a secondary effect.

Awesome stuff.

Then there's the matter of the other profession, The Warrior, which hasn't officially been revealed yet but was extensively mentioned in today's combat update. Many specific skills were mentioned, including Obliterate (a slow but strong damaging ability), Block, Shield Bash, Devastating Hammer (which has a knockback effect), Savage Leap (which sounds like it closes in on enemies), Rush, 100 Blades, Frenzy (which fills a Warrior's adrenalin gauge), Fear Me! (which inflicts weakness), Banner of Courage (which increases allied damage) and Destruction (an elite skill that makes the Warrior's attacks deal area-of-effect damage).

It's likely that the Warrior will be the next class revealed, and you can be certain that we'll be bringing you all the details.  Nick Kolan